Organization turned on its head ! How do we organize things ? The standard way of doing so is to group them into "similar buckets" so that finding them is easier. So all music goes in the Music folder. If I have a sudden urge of listening to 'mere sapnon ki rani', I go to the Music folder and then in the Kishore Kumar folder and then look for the song I want to play.In short it was the indexed way of thinking. One places and hence looks for later, similarly metadataed entities. The cost ? Takes time and effort. Every time I get a new document I have to place it in the right "bucket" so that I can find it easily later following the indexed trail. If I forget or I am lazy to do that, even though it is there somewhere in my digital realm, its lost to me for ever, as I can't find it later. The shortcomings ? The indexed method outlined above, is only half useful. The method only indexes file names, not the content inside them. Why is this even more relevant today ? We are deluged in content, tens of hundred of emails a day, news feeds, documents, online magazines ..Information glut is not only a reality, its fast becoming a problem. The new way! Do away with the heirachical structure, make one folder in your drive, call it Everything :). Place everything you have in that folder. No spending time on organizing and reorganizing your folder etc. Due to super fast searches which have already indexed your entire drive you dont need to drill down to the correct bucket to find the thing that you are looking for, the search itself will give you the file that you are looking for. I think this is a big paradigm shift in thinking about organizing documents. Dump your file structure and your indexed way of thinking ! Whatever you want just search for it . Ofcourse Gmail and Google desktop are both steps in that direction. Now if only someone could invent a way to have a search button inside a book, I would never have to go back and look for what the butler was doing in the second chapter when I am reading the last chapter of the detective novel, when the detective is explaining why the butler is the killer. I would just do a search on the butler ! (with ideas from m)  ¶ permalink 3 comments